AIR-CONDITIONING IS OUT

High-tech innovation is coming

Everybody talks about climate protection and global warming. But it seems that no one cares about what really happens to Mother Earth. Especially large companies and corporations are often blamed for fighting over the cheapest buildings and do not go for the ones that are the most eco-friendly.

With its emission-free building near New Dehli in India, Bayer MaterialScience does the opposite. The Innovation Center is the only building of its kind in the world. It is the first building erected within the Eco-Commercial Building Initiative. The formula reverses the usual approach to climate and construction: adapting the building to the climate instead of tailoring the climate-control to the building.

The temperatures in Greater Noida, a suburb of New Delhi, India, often reach more than 40 degrees C in the shade. To be comfortable indoors, air-conditioning must be turned on high, not only in the summer – the average temperature in this suburban city is 25 degrees Celsius.

It is here that an office building almost without air-conditioning will be built. „That’s impossible,” you might think. „No, it’s not,” says Dietmar Riecks, an architect based in Bochum, Germany. The building is tailored to the local climate and uses 70% less energy than conventional buildings. Special polyurethane insulation material reduces the heat conductivity of the building. A roof over the interior courtyard, made of the high-tech plastic Makrolon, offers protection from the sun. Solar cells supply the building with energy and make it independent from oil or gas. In a nutshell, the Innovation Center in Greater Noida is a zero-emission building.

It doesn’t matter where zero-emission buildings are built. Thanks to special climate simulation technology, it is possible to design minimum-energy buildings for every climate zone. The building in Greater Noria won’t be the only one in the world for very long – five more buildings in other countries already exist on the drawing board, all of them designed to rely on renewable energy.